There is ever-increasing demand for higher input/output (I/O) bandwidth to interconnect electronic devices. PCI-Express is a leading contender for delivering much higher I/O bandwidth than is available in conventional computing platforms. PCI-Express uses dedicated lanes between pairs of electronic devices rather than a conventional data bus through which all data for multiple electronic devices is routed.
In a PCI-Express system, I/O bandwidth of a host device may be divided among multiple remote devices through the allocation of dedicated lanes. For example, a host device with a PCI-Express connection having 16 dedicated lanes may allocate 8 of those lanes for communication with one remote device and another 8 lanes for communication with another remote device. In this example, the I/O bandwidth for the host device is equally divided between the two remote devices.
The host device needs to buffer data transmitted to the remote devices and received from the remote devices. A proposed host device buffering solution includes using separate transmit/receive buffers for each remote device. In this proposed solution, the host device would include a transmit and receive buffer pair for each I/O connection port of the host device through which a remote device can communicate with the host device. This approach has two drawbacks. First, multiple buffers require multiple address decode blocks that increases overall silicon usage, which is a precious computer architecture commodity. Second, transmit and receive buffer pairs go unused when a remote device is not coupled to I/O connection ports associated with those buffer pairs, thus wasting buffering capacity.
Cost and speed are two critical factors in the success of a computer architecture. Buffering solutions affect the cost and speed of the computer architecture. Improvements in cost and speed may be obtained by reducing silicon usage and efficiently using buffering capacity. Accordingly, improved buffering solutions that are not subject to the above limitations are needed. The present invention addresses this need among others.